The Sacrifice Game

(31)

2 Jeweled Skull followed our team out of the marshaling area into our red home zone. The shrill not-quite-cheering crescendoed and then rose above itself again and again. It was more like an ecstatic whine than a roar, at least by the standards of twenty-first-century sports fans. The sound sloshed from side to side, rising in one ear and falling in the other, following the lead of our two houses’ mockers as they taunted each other across the no-man’s-land at the center of the court.

All of us Harpy Ball Brethren, like the Ocelots’ team and most of the other Maya ball societies, wore elaborate animal-themed helmets that totally covered our faces. Like with Mexican wrestlers in the twenty-first century, the designs were all in the same style, but each player’s was unique and presumably intimidating. Anyway, they were as good as masks. And my tattoos and scars had been altered right after my arrival-well, “arrival”-here in Olde Mayaland. So I wasn’t likely to get recognized. Just once, as they introduced me under my alias-“10 Red Skink Lizard”-I broke form and turned to look back at the council house. Harpies and Harpy partisans were crawling over every surface. Some adolescent bloods had climbed up the spirit poles to get a better view, which was considered idiotically disrespectful, although at least they were being careful not to cover the effigies’ eyes. I studied the Harpies. They’d brought in an armory-worth of taken-down hand weapons. But it wasn’t a hot day, and like everyone else they’d worn layers of feather cloaks-which would get thrown down to their favorite big scorers-and you couldn’t tell. Despite all the tension, the Ocelots had let us into their precinct without searching us. It just wasn’t done. That is, no one ever brought anything but nonfunctioning ceremonial arms into the ball courts. It wasn’t like the Old West around here, with people wearing guns around town, if even the Old West was ever really like that, which I kind of doubt. And it wasn’t like flying in the U.S. in the twenty-first century, dealing with brownshirts from the TSA. Anyway if the Ocelots got the drop on us and found the weapons, it would be more than enough justification for liquidating the entire house. I snapped my head back around, facing west, toward the ball court and the beyond it the high, steep-sloped emerald wedge of the Ocelots’ mul.

From overhead the ball court would have looked like a huge capital I, with east at the top, and with two symmetrical banks on either side of the vertical bar. The top of each bank was a flat platform, or reviewing stand, where the highest-ranked spectators stood. Each bank had a sloping apron that descended to the level channel of the playing field at a forty-two-degree angle, so the structures were like truncated and elongated pyramids with their flat tops about five vertical Ixian arms-twelve feet-above the playing surface. The two bars of the I were marked by low boundary walls but open to the ground level, so that the VIPs could get to us. Beyond these end zones crowds of less important spectators could watch from the grounds surrounding the court and from two main vantage points: On the east, the wide swell of steps leading up to the long facade of the council house, and on the west, from the scarlet-and-emerald dawnward stairs of the Ocelots’ mul, although the eighth level and the temple above it-where I’d first found myself in Chacal’s mind-were empty. Also there had been tiers of extra wooden stands built for this one occasion, fed by a whole network of steps and catwalks behind the official platforms. Greathouse bloods’ hipball games had always been restricted events and the courts weren’t designed for the public. There were no seats, since there wasn’t any point having them. People would just jump up from excitement anyway, the way no one ever really sits down at rock concerts. Even 9 Fanged Hummingbird stood up for hundred-scores of beats in the 105°F+ heat to watch a game. The playing trench between the platforms was brightly painted, divided into the four directional quadrants, with a long line east to west down the center of the trench and a short north to south line bisecting it at the center of the court, so that each color area was about the shape of a capital L, with a quarter-circular bite out of the top left corner where it intersected with the jade-green circle of the central face-off zone. The circle was about a half-rope-length in diameter, say, eleven feet, with an eight-fingers-wide round greenstone block inlaid in its center. There were also two other stone markers set into the playing surface, one at each point where the top of the lower bar of the L intersected with the east-west middle line. The actual goals were three pairs of pegs jutting out from the vertical risers at the top of the sloping banks. They faced each other across the trench, one pair at the center and a pair on each end, in line with the markers. Only the central pair of targets was really important. Each was roughly a ten-inch cube. But really you don’t need to know any of that to understand what was going on in the game. You get a notion of it if you think of it as body soccer with a bowling ball.

The Ocelots’ goal was carved as a defleshed sky-cat and stuck with emerald-green macaw down, just for this event. The Harpies’ goal was carved as an earthtoad and, more cheaply, painted Harpy red. I felt all fat and stiff and Megazoid in the padding, like a penis swollen with Viagra. The area beyond the court boundary-which I guess you could call the sidelines-was crowded with VIP punters and a few high-caste bookies, looking us over as though we were racehorses in the paddock. Our team started to strut around the end zone in roughly counterclockwise paths, sawing the air with our hand guards. Our wood-and-leather yokes-big horseshoe-shaped protective belts-bounced off each other like old-time bumper cars. The players who’d stayed here kept looking at me. They, but only they, all knew who I was, and supposedly they’d been briefed about what to do. But they were still freaked out that I was alive and with them. I was still playing as “Red Skink Lizard,” presumably an obscure relief player. My disguise, or new identity, was still holding up. It might not last once I started playing, though. Not if I used any of the old signature moves. I stopped pacing and tucked my head down under my helmet, like I was praying. 2JS came up next to me. He didn’t turn his ornament-swollen head, but he spoke to me in our house language and so low that no one could hear us over the shouting.

“And am I going to lose another son?” he asked. He was referring to five foster sons and two biological ones, including the one he’d sacrificed in my place, who had already died on him. And he was talking about the hipball game, not the battle we were anticipating afterward. Full matches at these stakes were pretty dangerous. I-or rather Chacal-had played twenty-eight full great-hipball games, four of them with nearly identical rules and timing. But that was an exceptional record, and people had been killed around me in almost every match I’d played. The general feeling was that an athlete’s career was so short anyway that you might as well die on the court. And one effect was that ballplayers started playing more recklessly as they get older. Emerald Immanent and a couple of the other Ocelot players were just at that age when you expect them to give it absolutely all they had, which could mean taking you with them.

I said the closest thing to “I’ll be careful.”

2 Jeweled Skull said that if I survived the ball game he wanted me to get off the court and into the middle of a special squad of Harpy bloods led by 7 Wind, who was another of his sons. They had instructions to get me the hell out of there, off the Ocelots’ temple promontory and out to the Harpies’ mountain milpas in the east. Then, even if 2 Jeweled Skull was killed or captured, I’d still have at least a chance of getting back someday and setting up my special tomb.

I said I thanked my father but that I didn’t want to desert him.

He said playing under a new name-that is, not for my own prestige-was enough.

I said I was worried that we’d be cut off from the mainland. Actually, I was trying to get him to open up about what he was going to do. If anything. He said he had sixty score nonbloods from dependent families-what you could call the bulk of the Harpy infantry-waiting outside the eastern gate. They hadn’t been told anything beforehand, though, and they were just now being briefed on what it was their Father of the East, that is, 2 Jeweled Skull, needed from them. Also they weren’t allowed to touch spears, blowguns, or saws, and could only fight with clubs. Still, they had barges ready and were going to lash them together and lay planks over them, and try to get across the canal from the Harpy Quarter to the council house, bypassing the permanent bridge, which of course the Ocelots were guarding. After that, the Harpy clubmen were going to try to take control of the council house and give us at least one relatively secure base on the peninsula.

2JS also said a messenger had come from Koh’s followers saying they were only six-hundred-score beats away. But their scouts had run into Ocelot patrols, and since we didn’t want to tip them off, the Rattlers were going to hold back until they got the word the hipball game had started.

So maybe we’d be all right.

“Well, okay, dude, great, let’s go,” I said in English. “Well, sheesh, this is a long way from the United States Chess Federation Interzonal at the Springfield, Massachusetts, Hyatt Regency Resort Hotel and Convention Center, isn’t it?

2 Jeweled almost smiled. It was enough to give me a little shiver. Maybe it was like Koh had said back under the Tree of Mirror Leaves, that he’d gotten a bigger dose of me than I’d thought. I’d been pretty sure that he just had bits and pieces, random beads that he couldn’t string together into a coherent Jedditude. But being in on stupid little private jokes took a pretty advanced level of understanding someone. Maybe I had a way of growing on you.

“We’ll just Win Through Despondency,” I said, “Harnessing the Power of Self-Loathing.” It wasn’t a gem, but he smiled and then chuckled, and then I did, and for a beat we couldn’t stop laughing, it was like, we’re like twins, we grew up together, we’re homies, we’re just chillin’ out A Harpy messenger came up and signed that the Ocelots were ready. 2JS waved him away. Our talk was over. He blessed the team with his cigar and left to take his place on the platform. I looked after him for a beat as he walked west. I hadn’t realized how lonely I’d been feeling without him to talk to about stuff. He was the only one around who actually understood.

I looked up and peeked around. The muls were all dressed for the occasion, draped in gigantic feather-embroidered tapestry mantles that had last been unfolded at the sheaving of the fifth katun before this one, eighty solar years ago. They were crowned with huge headdresses of radiating tree trunks tufted with ribbons to imitate giant feathers, and trailing necklaces of huge feather-flowers in the air. Uay-animal floats slid deliberately through the walkways, levitating up and down steps and spinning in the squares. The lacework superstructure above the city was filled with kites and papered torch-cages like big multiple lanterns. Effigies of the ahaus and bacabs and various sun-adders stood in the upper steps of the mulob, holding the lords’ places while their flesh bodies were down watching the ball game. I tucked my head down again.

Damn, I thought. There’d been so many things I wanted to ask 2JS. How was he dealing with the debris of myself inside him? Was he more me or less me than he’d been eighty-five days before? Or was I already so different now from the Jed that entered him that it didn’t matter? On top of everything I was feeling, maybe not teary, but a little misty.

Out in the center court the hazing contest had segued into the actual challenge to the match. I could hear the Ocelot negotiator offering to double the purse and the Harpy negotiator accepting. Better not whiff out on this one, I thought. Actually, I hadn’t been stellar in our last practice on the road. But maybe with an impossible challenge, Chacal’s ballplaying genius would come through. Right?

I smelled something. It was Koh’s cinnamon-in-reverse perfume. I broke protocol and looked up.